For most of us, the word "appeasement" conjures up the feckless figure of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who after his return from Munich on September 30, 1938, waved a worthless treaty and proclaimed "peace in our time" just hours after he had surrendered Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany, thus lighting the fuse of World War II. Yet it would be a mistake to think that the debacle of Munich was the fault of Chamberlain’s timidity and naïveté. A state’s temptation to appease an aggressor it is strong enough to resist has complex origins beyond the failings of any one leader.
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